Verizon: we need freedom to delay P2P traffic when necessary

There has "always been a requirement for network management," said Verizon CTO Richard Lynch Tuesday at the Progress & Freedom Foundation's annual Aspen conference on tech policy, even in the analog age. In the wake of the FCC's recent Comcast decision, debates over "network management" have escaped the engineers' offices and now take place even among skeptical consumers who worry about what such management will do to their Internet connections. Lynch laid out Verizon's view on the matter: time-sensitive packets like VoIP should be prioritized over less-sensitive packets like P2P, but the company remains committed to "deliver any and all data requested by our customers."

Thanks to its fiber-to-the-home commitment, Verizon doesn't face the same congestion issues that plague many cable operators. While current cable networks may share a single uplink between several hundred homes, Verizon's fiber nodes serve an average of only 32 homes—and the uplink has more bandwidth to begin with. Verizon can currently offer 50Mbps symmetric connections, with 100Mbps connections already in trials, and it can add capacity on lit fiber simply by turning on additional wavelengths.

But Lynch rejects the idea that the only acceptable form of network management is none at all—that is, that Verizon and other ISPs should all commit to delivering all packets, all the time, with zero delay. At the last conference where Lynch presented his idea, he was "accused quite vocally and loudly of all sorts of horrific things" and told that Verizon should just keep investing money.

Lynch oversees Verizon's capital expenditures and notes that the company pumps $17 billion a year into its network infrastructure. But building a network that could, even at peak times, deliver every single packet without delay could prove prohibitively expensive as traffic continues to grow at 50 percent a year. If Verizon built a network that could ensure no packet ever got delayed, "customers would be upset" over what Verizon would have to charge to make that possible.

Richard Lynch

Finding a balance of cost, performance, and service quality depends on an optimized traffic flow, and to Lynch, this means dividing traffic into two classes: time-sensitive and everything else. Such a management technique amounts to protocol discrimination, though Verizon commits not to deal in content discrimination—all VoIP calls, from all services, will receive the same treatment. Under heavy loads, the network would prioritize the time-sensitive protocols and delay the others until capacity is available. Lynch believes that few customers would even notice the "22ms delay" in other services.

Whatever techniques Verizon ultimately adopts, though, Lynch believes that the way to alleviate customer suspicion is transparency. "We don't have all the answers yet," he said, adding that he was personally still thinking through some of these issues. But full disclosure of network management practices is the "best way to go about it."

Deep packet inspection would power such a solution, and Lynch has a message for all the "DPI haters" out there: look at the issue from an engineer's perspective. In his view, this is the only rational way to manage a network for the largest number of users.